Allister Frost is Head of Digital Marketing Strategy at Microsoft and a highly respected blogger. He'll be among the speakers at Figaro's Social Media Marketing Conference on 5 April. See the full agenda and get early bird tickets here. We asked Allister for his own in-depth analysis of the current state of social media marketing
To what extent has social media now proved its value in terms of ROI and acquisition? And how do you think brands should be measuring success within social media?
I think you’re asking the wrong question. Trying to measure the ROI of social media is like trying to calculate the value a business gets from providing office chairs or fresh air for its employees. Social media is not a distinct thing that you can measure; it merely describes the ways people have conversations online. Attempts to rigidly measure an amorphous societal behavior like this are always destined to fail.
Many companies still define social media as “doing something on the big social networks,” like Facebook or LinkedIn, and these are often just tactical efforts to push the same marketing messages through these new channels. In this instance you might think you can measure ROI by comparing the cost per thousand people reached on a social network channel versus, say, a press advertisement, but by doing this you’re comparing apples and oranges. When consumers interact with a brand through the social web, be it on a laptop, tablet, smartphone or other connected device, they behave very differently to their interactions with more traditional communication channels. You simply cannot compare the two and these social channels are so new and fast-moving that there is no one-size-fits-all measurement framework available.
Every brand has to assess the value they derive from two-way interactions on the social web in the light of their unique business goals. For some, reach and engagement alone will be good indicators of success, while for others conversions to trial or purchase will be more important. So, in short, there’s no single solution to measuring the ROI of enabling social media behaviours in marketing campaigns and marketers need to develop their own informed opinion depending on their unique business goals.
What advice would you have for brands who want to ensure social media is more fully integrated into their broader marketing objectives?
Start by defining the behaviours you’d like your target audience to exhibit, and build your plans from there. If you know how you’d like your target audience to discover, consume and share - and those desired behaviours are rooted in the reality of how people live their lives in our digital world - you’ll be much better placed to define the tactical programmes you should run to encourage this behaviour.
Many companies still treat social web activities as separate line items in their marketing plan, often a bolt-on to traditional routes to market, but today’s smartest marketers have figured out that the only way to make the social web work for your brand is to distribute it across everything you do. I don’t believe, for example, that there’s an easy justification for pure awareness campaigns now we live in a world where people are - or should be - only one click away from purchase. Even if you feel there’s a need to build awareness for your brand or new product, you should still ensure that your target audience can find, interact, and share your content at the click of a button. To do this well, you may need to turn your marketing planning process on its head and instead of starting with what your company needs you should begin with what tomorrow’s audience will expect from you. And, guess what, your customers are often looking for very different things to what gets served up in traditional marketing approaches.
What are some of the commonest mistakes you see brands making when they enter social media?
The most common mistake is to think of social media as one, or a combination of, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, or any other channel. Social media behaviours often take place on these big network channels but you risk missing the entire point of the social web if you narrow your vision to only these well-known sites.
In the space of just a few short years society has learned how to search for and discover information through the internet, and we’ve also discovered how easy it is to share, review, rate, and edit this information. It’s this empowered access to information that lies at the heart of the social media phenomenon, and consumers have come to expect these interaction choices wherever they go.
This means your website, your product brochures, your advertising, your employees - in fact, every possible touch-point that consumers can have with your products and services - may benefit from becoming a two-way communication channel. Creating a Facebook page (or a LinkedIn Group, or anything on the big networks) alone, as many companies do, is no longer enough to allow your consumers to engage with your company on their terms. Loosen your blinkers and think about how you can enable social media type behaviours in everything that you do. This is the path to fully embracing the opportunities created by the new ways people approach purchase decisions.
Some recent research undertaken by Figaro suggested that users tend to connect with brands on Facebook in order to take advantage of specific offers or promotions, but are more reluctant to engage long-term, while a recent TNS Digital Life Survey indicated that 61 per cent of users don’t want to engage with brands on social media at all. What do you make of those findings, and what might the implications be for marketers?
The findings make complete sense to me! When did you last visit Facebook because you wanted to see advertising? You went there to see what was happening in your social circle and to have conversations with people you know. Right from its invention in the 1400s, no-consumer ever requested advertising; it was created to provide an economic model to support content creation and allow brands to share a ready-made audience. It’s the same on the social web, and savvy marketers understand this and have stopped using these channels exclusively to shout advertising messages. In the online world the value exchange between consumer and brand is key; don’t agonise over what’s in it for your brand, ask yourself 'what’s in it for the consumer?'
That’s why promotions, offers, and competitions work quite well for grabbing attention, but that’s rarely a good start point for a deep, meaningful relationship. Most consumers don’t want to hang out with advertisers (it’s no secret that marketing is one of the most disliked professions), but they do like spending time with people who share the same values and beliefs or who can add some value to their lives. So don’t expect everyone to want to ’like’ what you’re doing online, but do try to create as much utility as possible by sharing things that the engaged segment of your audience will appreciate, enjoy, and maybe pass on to other people they like.
What do you see as the most significant issues facing social media marketers over the next 12 months?
Three things come to mind that have held back the marketing industry’s progress in recent years: (1) siloed thinking that’s limited only to the online world (and ignores the huge latent potential of traditional marketing techniques), (2) the inability or reluctance to embrace all of the touch-points that consumers use on the path to purchase, and (3) inexperienced people who describe themselves as 'social media gurus' but lack the substance to span the breadth of the full marketing mix.
It’s time for marketers to ditch the hype and move into a more mature phase of properly integrated, social web enabled, marketing programmes. There will always be ambiguity and uncertainty - the exponential advances of technology guarantee that—so get used to not having all the answers and be prepared to take some informed risks. There will always be something new and unexpected that will disrupt our plans and force us to rethink our approaches. Get used to it; change is coming at us faster than ever before, but the opportunity for smart marketers to make a real and positive difference in our digital world has never been greater.
Allister Frost's blog:
http://allisterfrost.com
www.twitter.com/allisterf